A Design Miami conversation between Vito Acconci and Mitchell Joachim, both artists and architects often at the verge of one discipline or another, focused on Acconci’s origins in poetry and art and transition into architecture.

Acconci’s collaboration with the architect Steven Holl was a case in point, and one of Acconci’s first projects in the realm of architecture. The re-façading of the slim exhibition space into a series of rotating panels produced a “quasi public space”. “You had to expand it, open it up,” said Acconci.

Acconci described the design process with Holl as staggered, as Acconci’s interest was in creating utility, and Holl’s in creating art: “Each time we met Steven would bring something that resembled projects of mine and I would bring things that resembled his. Until we stared with hinges, with ideas that we could have in common.”

When asked about literary influences, Acconci cited Faulkner. “I was interested in Faulkner because he had such a hard time putting a period on the end of a sentence. As if putting on the period was equivalent to dying.”